Sunshine, wintry showers and some very bad driving

Winter had returned by Saturday and I had caught the virus James had over Easter so things were not looking good. I had enough energy to keep our lunch commitment that day with friends at the Scottish Malt Whisky Society (while it hailed outside) but did little else for the rest of that day or Sunday morning. We left after lunch and the cherry tree I had photographed on Thursday had now lost most of its petals due to the wind and rain. On the A702 we could see that some of the Moorfoots and Tinto had a covering of snow but the sun was shining and if we had had the time to exploit them, there were several photographic possibilities as we drove past the Pentlands. After visiting a friend in South Lanarkshire (when it hailed again) we were back on the M74 in sunshine. South of the border it began to rain heavily and the traffic began to pick up. Signs began to warn us of delays south of junction 21 and I had pondered leaving the M6 at the M61 and going round the M60 to the A34. James then advised avoiding that route as there was a Manchester City/Manchester United match at Old Trafford that afternoon. We carried on and somewhere near Preston saw an amazingly bad manoeuvre involving leaving the motorway up the off ramp and returning to it via the on ramp. I would have forgiven them had it been an unmarked police car on a job but James pointed out that this was unlikely as it had a personalised number plate. Further south, fields of oilseed rape were flowering in the sunshine. We saw a DeLorean on the back of a truck which looked like it was in the process of being customised like the one in Back to the Future. The warnings about delays persisted so we left at junction 21 and followed the Irlam Royalettes Morris Dancers Bus to the Warburton Bridge. This cantilever bridge always reminds me of some we crossed on Route 66. We paid our 12p and were soon across and on the way home. Just as we were about to leave the A50 we observed another example of bad driving when someone overtook several cars at a crossroads and was very lucky to avoid anyone coming in the opposite direction.